After a lot of deliberation we decided to visit the infamous Security Prison 21 – a high school before the Khmer Rouge took over and turned it into concentration camp – nowadays housing the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The museum is dedicated to the memory of the thousands of inmates tortured and eventually killed by the Khmer Rouge during their few years of terror among the urban population of Cambodia. Security Prison 21 has been the place where no means have been too harsh to gain confession from a prisoner and where both Khmer Rouge members and outsiders alike have been meeting their end. The ones lucky enough to survive the prison have been taken to be exterminated at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields – which we might visit after S21 if the experience was not bad enough for our more sensitive participants. We had also agreed to let one of the drivers – we called him Jambo, just to continue the tradition – hanging around at our hostel to know if we will need a ride to the Killing Fields… and he was nowhere to be found in the morning…

We walked to the museum from our hostel – almost straight road – only stopping to get some water refills on the way, In retrospective we should have stocked up even more water as the day was extremely hot and the sun was scorching down on us. The entry fee to the museum was mere $3, though a guidebook or a guided tour would have cost us more (and some of us got in for free with a Finnish student id, though the gate guards did study it quite extensively.) Yet again, it might have been a good idea to get at the least one of those options.

The courtyard housed the graves of the last 14 victims of the prison, found dead when the Vietnamese forces liberated the area. There were also gallows standing in the yard once housing rings for gymnastics, but used by the Khmer Rouge as a torture device – the victims hands were bound behind his back, and he was then suspended in mid air from his wrists until he passed out from the excruciating pain. He was then dipped into a vat of cold water to wake him up for the next torture session. And alongside this seemingly innocent thing there were these ordinary vertical gymnastics bars that we are used to seeing at any playground in the west. The human mind can truly twist and corrupt anything it sees…

The first of the four three story buildings was used to house the “traitors” from the ranks on Khmer Rouge and the rooms were larger than the other ones in the complex – basically the rooms were used as they were when the Khmer Rouge arrived, just stripped of all the items and equipped with a simple metallic bed and an iron leg shackle connected to it, alongside some sort of chamber pot kinda device – usually an empty ammo container. The building also housed a big common room in the upstairs, that was used as a mass detention area for the lesser “traitors”. Some of the rooms downstairs still portrayed blood spatters on the walls and even on the high – 3½ to 4m high – ceiling, portraying the savagery of the beatings the inmates had to endure.

The second building was build in relatively same manner as the first one, though this one housed rows and rows of pictures of the prisoners and personnel, all sorts of diagrams and some items recovered form the prison when it was freed by the Vietnamese. There were even images of the last victims found and once could see clearly the horrors inflicted on them – one had had his hands bound behind his back and clear alcohol pored into his nose, causing savage burns on the upper respiratory track and eventually leading to him drowning in a mixture of alcohol, tissue fluid, broken down tissue and vomit. I also happened to overhear one guide telling her group about the forced migration implemented by the Khmer Rouge: Almost all the urban population from all the cities in Cambodia were forced to move to farming communes in the countryside – as per the communistic utopia. In the case of this womans family this meant being relocated over 100km away by foot. These forced marches claimed the lives of thousands and thousands of Cambodians in a short time… And as the result, the populace was still suffering from hunger under the Khmer Rouge rule. So much for that utopia.

The third building had been preserved in the condition it was while the prison operated at it’s full capacity: the two first floors housed individual cells less than 2m by 1m in size, build with brick or wooden inner walls. The third floor once again held bigger cell blocks meant for the masses. The balcony on all three floors were wrapped in thick layer of barbed wire – as much to prevent the inmates from escaping as to prevent them form killing themselves. There were also thick iron fences closing the ends of each corridor. The atmosphere in the small, dank and dim – even in the bright daylight –  brick cells in the first floor was claustrophobic and as depressing as it gets. The inmates in here were chained to the floor and had very little leeway in any way and had ammo containers or some miscellaneous pots for toilets. Some were still even portraying the blood spatters from the violence witnessed by those very same walls just some decades earlier. There were no doors at all in the cells as they were not needed. Big doors still closed the cell block areas – but even those were not that sturdy. The wooden cells in the second floor were not much better, though there was a bit more light in that area, The cells also sported a door with small iron barred window, so the inmates have been able to move a tiny bit better than the ones downstairs. The third floor had bigger rooms where chains hooked onto numbered spots on the wall showed the place of each prisoner – sometimes even closer to 30 per room. All of the floors were missing any signs of any kind of sleeping places, so I was left with the impression that the prisoners slept on the cold tile floors.

The fourth building included more in detail descriptions and pictures about the attrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge – most gruesome of which seemed to have been the executions of infants by throwing them in air and impaling em with bayonets. There were also descriptions and testimonials of the inmates as well as the people who had been working in S21. There was also small display of the horrors found in the Killing Fields – which was the end station on the journey of many of the prisoners from Tuol Sleng – including a wall full of human skulls, glass chests full of bone fragments as well as other remains. I have to be honest though – it was not the torture images nor the remains that really affected me, but the confessions of the people who had been working there. Many of them had been pressed to serving the Khmer Rouge out of fear for their lowed ones or plain self preservation – just as the survivors of S21 had been the ones among the prisoners who had been doing valuable work for the Khmer Rouge. It really struck me that most of the folks there were ordinary, more or less decent, people who just had been stuck in between the rock and the hard place. This building also contained a couple of guest books – which ofc our fellow visitors had to sign – so we were bothered a couple times by a burly middle aged Russian guy wearing a worn out baseball cap, a Coca-Cola west and a t-shirt of Putin giving thumbs up.

A truly chilling place, even in the heat of the mid day sun. It is really horrifying to think that only 7 of the 15.000 to 20.000 prisoners held in Tuol Sleng during the 4 years of Khmer Rouge terror. A small comical relief – or in fact a sign of the (corrupting?) power of market economy – was provided by one of the survivors being there to sign his biography. He must be doing that on almost daily basis. I could not feel more weirded even if Ann Frank having survived would be signing the copies of her diaries in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Regardless of that – Tuol Sleng made a lasting impression on me, after all what happened there is much more recent event than what happened in the Nazi concentration camps – actually the prison closed just some years before I was born and I can even remember the news about the death of Pol Pot and the eventual surrender of the Khmer Rouge. Humankind never learns…

The Russian Market

We decided against visiting the Killing Fields as S21 had taken a heavy toll on our mental reserves and the Killing Fields would need to tap to that same resource. Instead we decided to walk to the Russian Market -a market catering to the need of locals and tourists alike –  a kilometer or so to the south from Tuol Sleng. The first and most serious mistake of the day.

The day had gotten excruciatingly hot while we were in S21 and by the time we got out we were not only feeling overwhelmed by the museum, but also boiling in our clothes – it is really not appropriate to visit such a place in beach clothes so we were wearing longer pants and shirts than we would have otherwise done. And in addition we did not realize how low on water we were before it was too late.

The journey took us through some really poor neighbourhoods and deep into the local districts. The English texts we had grown so accustomed seeing accompanying almost every sign in Cambodia, were almost non-existent here. We decided to go for a round or two or beers before hitting the crowded alleys of the market area, which proved to be a bit of a challenge. There were almost no places selling beer in the vicinity on the Russian Market that we could find – even some of those that advertised the most common of the local brands, Angkor, with big signs on the street side turned us down with dry mouths. We finally got a to a large local fish restaurant where they did indeed have beer – only to have it served for one of us with a hefty chunk of ice, while the rest of us got pre-chilled cans. Alarm bells rang already, but beer’s beer.

Once we got to the market, it soon turned out that it was almost closing time (5pm) as many of the shops inside were already packing away their inventory or had even rolled down the steel doors. Even from what we saw, it seemed to me that the Russian Market was the largest and most varying of all the market places we have visited in Cambodia before or after that, and I would have wished to explore it a bit further. Maybe some day I will still have the chance. One of the curiosities there was the local “wine” – in fact more or less a spirit – sold in a glass bottle filled with scorpions and snakes. And I am sure I could have found some clothing items there as well, and possibly even some jewelry. And that was just a brief glimpse of what was offered.

We had to get out as the place was closing, but more importantly we had to get back to the hostel because everyone was dead tired and not feeling so well. We haggled a bit with a local tuk-tuk driver and managed to press down the price to bearable numbers in the end by mentioning that we are Finns and telling that we would walk the way there almost as fast as he could drive us there and would not really need a ride – a small lie, as in our condition that was in no way true, but on a good day I could have navigated us there on foot only maybe 5-10 mins slower than we got there by a tuk.

The aftermath

Fun fact of the day: heat stroke can cause not only vomiting, but also severe diarrhea.

And diarrhea it was, at the least for one of our jolly gang. The heat had done it’s deed and Ville, our veteran had gotten a bad heat stroke, having bad head ache and feeling rather much under the weather all in all. I personally – as a rather heat sensitive person – did manage to avoid the worst only because of my trusted stetson, though I had to rely on painkillers as well. And by the evening Ville had gotten a bad diarrhea and I had to run to the toilet a couple times as well, but had not gotten the explosive kind of the aforementioned problem… For long we thought that it was the ice that was to blame for the stomach problems and could not connect the two.

When it came the time to leave for supper, we had to leave Ville to tend his head ache and to start his ascension to the porcelain throne. I left with the girls to a cool nearby restaurant that Ville and I  had spotted the day before, called Chez Mama’s. The owners seemed to be somewhat of international citizens themselves and had been traveling, as well as most likely seeing quite a lot of budget travelers in their restaurant.

It was in Chez Mama’s that I finally dared myself to try the Khmer curry, and oh boy! It is kinda stew – not too much unlike the Carelian stew – based on coconut milk and a lot of different spices, most prominently chili –  though chili does not overpower the other spices. The stew includes different kinds of vegetables – most commonly carrot, potato and green pepper – alongside a meat of some sort (fish, chicken or pork seem to be the common options). As a chicken lover I opted for the chicken variety, and I really have to say that I fell in love with this dish, eating it time and time again in different venues. I also see this dish as a perfect example of the mix in between the original kitchen in Indochina and the French influence: the potato, carrot and cream type of broth is definitely of French origin, while green pepper and the spices are of local design.

During the night we did not only polish the throne, but also slept really bad because of the noises coming from the street – there was some bloke banging some weird instrument every night at a certain time and as early as 5.30am the locals started buzzing in their usual businesses.